Nintendo Okie

There comes a time when you have to decide whether you respect a person for their opinion or if you believe they’re just talking to hear themselves talk. That time has come with Michael Pachter. I used to really respect his opinions and would read the things he had to say because he seemed to have insider info that we just don’t get. That may still be the case, but I think more and more you’re hearing things from him just to hear him talk. Lately it also seems like he’s trying to hid the fact that he’s been wrong about Nintendo more and more.

His job is that of an analyst. He takes the information that he has and makes general predictions and analyzes, for lack of a better word, the information that he has. Basically he is supposed to translate sales data and give it to us in layman’s terms. Most of the time we don’t really need that type of talking down to. He’s also using clever remarks to hide the fact that he’s been wrong a number of times. Now granted, when you do this for a living sometimes you’re going to get it wrong.

For instance, recently he said that Netflix on the Wii would be less successful than the HD counterparts to the service, mainly because of the lack of HD and the need to have a disc in the drive to run it. Because of this he expected 300-400 thousand new customers for 2010 on the service. The facts point to something different. In the first 3-4 weeks that the service was available there were more than 900,000 people who participated in the service. Now, granted, that doesn’t say new users it just says people that participated in the service. There’s no real numbers as to how many of those people were already subscribers and how many are new, but that’s a lot larger than the four-hundred thousand that he initially said.

The biggest point of news that he’s been touting is that there will be an announcement or even release of an HD Wii in 2010. He says that Nintendo needs to update their console in order to stay competitive. Well, monthly sales data continues to prove him wrong. Consistently month after month Wii outsells the PS3 and the 360, many times combined. The numbers are lower than the same period last year, but they’re still higher than the competition. I don’t see how that shows that the Wii needs to do something else to be competitive. Now because Nintendo is not showing off any new hardware, outside of the 3DS he has changed his tune to something different. Rather than saying that Nintendo needs to do something he hides behind jokes.  “There is a Wii HD in 2010, it’s just called PS3 with Move.” That just smacks of someone who’s trying to cover up that he’s been blowing smoke up people’s butts.

I used to listen to him all the time, he had a lot of very interesting things to say. It was intelligent talk of competition, mostly between Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo has proven this generation that they know what they’re doing. They’re putting out more and more million selling pieces of software. The systems, both console and handheld, continue to dominate the charts, and people are interested in Nintendo after a couple generations of things being soft for them. So many people, after almost four years, still can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that Nintendo is doing well. They counted them out in the beginning and still don’t want to look the facts in the eye.

I respect the man. I think it’s great to get paid to do what he does. More and more often, though, I think he’s wrong and he doesn’t want to give all three companies the respect they deserve. All three platform holders are doing something to help gaming. I have my opinions on which ones I think are doing more and which ones are latching onto proven technology and you can probably guess how I feel. From now on I’ll take everything Michael Pachter says with a grain of salt.